40 Real People Executed for Witchcraft

1. Bridget Cleary’s husband murdered her in 1894, and she is known as the ‘last witch burned in Ireland’

When Bridget Cleary didn’t come home on time one night in 1894, her husband, Michael, feared the worst. When she returned, he accused her of being a witch pretending to be the real Bridget. Bridget refused to confess, so Michael and his co-conspirators made her sit naked on a peat fire. Still, she refused, but at last, with her body terribly burned, furious Bridget accused Michael’s mother of consorting with fairies. Enraged, Michael poured lamp oil over her and set her alight. Michael buried Bridget in a shallow grave, and did 20 years’ hard labour for her murder.

Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

Barstow, Anne. Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. London: Pandora, 1994.

Borman, Tracy. Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts. London: Vintage Books, 2014.

Hutton, Ronald. The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017.

Mormando, Franco. The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Pickering, David. Cassell’s Dictionary of Witchcraft. London: Cassell, 1998.

Trevor-Roper, H.R. The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: and Other Essays. London: Harper and Row, 1969.